Posts Tagged "food safety"

Earlier this month, I watched groups of kids ages 9 to 16 present their own original ideas for solving major food safety problems. They were participating in the annual First Lego League challenge, the robotics competition founded by inventor Dean Kamen and Lego. We heard ideas for better ways of monitoring the pH level of [...]

Anna Kuchment is a Contributing Editor at Scientific American and a staff science writer at The Dallas Morning News. She was previously a reporter, writer and editor with Newsweek magazine. She is also author of “The Forgotten Cure,” about bacteriophage viruses and their potential as weapons against antibiotic resistance. Anna can be found on Twitter as @akuchment.

From high-fructose corn syrup to lean finely textured beef, health or safety concerns about specific food ingredients can capture the public’s attention and have the potential to significantly impact the food industry. While some food fears are backed by scientific evidence, a recent study by Cornell University researchers suggests food fears may also have a [...]

Julianne Wyrick has a bachelor’s in biochemistry and is currently a master’s student in the health and medical journalism program at the University of Georgia, where she also writes about science for the Office of Research Communications. Find her on the web at juliannewyrick.com. Julianne can be found on Twitter as @juliannewyrick.

Everyone knows that broccoli is good for you. What was not known—until researchers examined how broccoli was prepared for distribution—is that frozen broccoli lacked the cancer-fighting nutrients that the fresh vegetable provided. With a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), however, scientists at the University of Illinois discovered [...]

Tom Grumbly is president of the Supporters of Agricultural Research, a non-partisan coalition of scientific, consumer and producer groups working to educate stakeholders about the importance of funding agricultural research. Tom has held leadership roles in the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the White House Office of Management and Budget and was Under Secretary of Energy during the Clinton Administration.

There are nano-sized particles in your food. Does this make you nervous? A new report from an environmental health group, As You Sow, raises concern about nanoparticles in some popular sweets. The group says it found particles of titanium dioxide less than 10 nanometers in size in the powdered sugar coating on donuts from Dunkin’ [...]

We now have responses to the Top Science Questions facing the US from Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. So I thought I’d look at some of the specifics in their answers to the next question in our weekly list–number 7, on agriculture and food safety. (For this election-year project, Scientific American partnered with [...]

How safe was your last meal? If you dined out, you took a significant risk. The Centers for Disease Control estimates 76 million Americans acquire foodborne illnesses annually. In the U.S., 3,334 incidences of outbreaks from 1998 to 2002 were reported in restaurants or delicatessens according to a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. And recent [...]